Hitachi GST to unveil the industry’s first 12Gbps SAS SSD

Hitachi GST, a subsidiary of Western Digital, has announced the storage industry’s first demonstration of a 12Gbps SAS SSD, double the current SAS speed used in enterprise servers. It will participate in the 12Gbps SAS demonstration at the SCSI Trade Association Technology Showcase, which takes place on the 9th May, 2012 in California.

SAS hard disks and SSDs are the main type of storage drives used in enterprise servers due to the advantage of the SCSI capabilities not present in consumer SATA adapters. Many of today’s SAS drives include a second interface port to also double the bandwidth, so when combined with 12Gbps per port, this provides a total bandwidth of 24Gbps (4.8GB/s) to the drive, 4 times that of consumer 6Gbps SATA drives. 12Gbps SAS is also backwards compatible with 6Gbps SAS to allow 12Gbps drives to be used with a 6Gbps SAS adapter and vice versa.

So far no further info of this SSD has been made available, not even a hint of sequential performance. With 12Gbps SAS now here, it will interesting to see how long it takes before consumer SATA catches up, especially with high end SSDs maxing out the 6Gbps bandwidth. SAS requires a PCIe adapter to use and with the hefty price of the most basic 6Gbps models, a 12Gbps controller will cost a small fortune, never mind a 12Gbps SAS SSD.